[Mb-civic] The Price of Fear Is Paid in Lost Freedom

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-agee13dec13.story

COMMENTARY

The Price of Fear Is Paid in Lost Freedom
 By Joel Agee
 Joel Agee's memoir, "In the House of My Fear," was just published by
Shoemaker & Hoard. His translation of Hans Erich Nossack's "The End: Hamburg
1943" will be published by the University of Chica

 December 13, 2004

 I told a friend I would be writing an essay about fear. He cautioned me,
counseled me: "Don't say that our fears are groundless." He had heard me
express the widespread opinion that in allowing ourselves to be governed by
fear, we may be forfeiting our freedom.

 Of course our fears are not groundless. Who would deny the threat of
nuclear and biological war on our shores? And there are militant factions
within three major religions that seem intent on fulfilling some prophecy of
a final war between good and evil, certain that they and not their enemies
are the children of light. What greater danger can be imagined?

 But just for that reason it seems to me necessary to live without fear ‹ to
the extent that we are able, of course. This does not mean we should not
protect ourselves from real dangers. It means we must be vigilant against
the counsels of fear.




 What impressed me most forcefully in the pictures from Abu Ghraib was how
fear was employed as an instrument of torture. Humiliation too ‹ but those
photographs were meant to terrify, because they could be used to shame the
victims in their communities.

 Why has the discussion of these outrages very nearly vanished from public
discourse? Does our silence bespeak a tacit consent to their possible
continuation? If so, what would be our motive? I believe it is fear ‹ fear
of an elusive, treacherous enemy, but also fear of seeing the depths to
which we may go for the sake of an equally elusive security.




 I spent my formative years behind the Iron Curtain. It is commonplace to
say the people there were deprived of their freedom. This is true, but it is
a truth that was not evident to many of those people. If you live in a
stooped position long enough you can come to mistake it for an upright
stance. 

 I remember crossing the East German border after I had lived in the West
for a while. There was an obvious external difference ‹ more color on one
side, more traffic, more flowers.

 But the inner difference was less easy to identify. I called it freedom, as
most people did. But remembering it now, I think that fear and the lack of
it describe it better. There is no freedom without freedom from fear.




 A friend who grew up in Czechoslovakia and now lives in America told me
about a sensation of deja vu he has felt in recent years ‹ the Sovietization
of America, he calls it.

 "Not really," I said. "We're still a free people."

 He proposed a theory of "cultural hydraulics": When McDonald's arrives in
Moscow, something is displaced. It goes down the tube and comes up here.

 "Like what?" I asked.

 "Like political correctness, patriotic groupthink ‹ thought police."

 I laughed. 

 "There's more," he said: " 'You're either with us or against us' ‹ remember
that tone?" 

 "Sure," I said, catching his drift, "and I guess secret surveillance Š. "

 "Arrests without warrants."

 "Indefinite detention."

 At that point we fell silent. "This is getting depressing," he said.

 A little later he asked me: "Why do you think people put up with it?"

 "Because they're afraid."




 Of all the stories in the world's religions, the one that inspires me most
is the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, sitting under the Bodhi
tree, at the end of a path of austerity and fruitless searching.

 A shepherd girl brings him a bowl of rice milk to restore his emaciated
body, and he resolves not to rise until he attains Enlightenment. Mara, the
Lord of Illusion, unleashes his armies ‹ every conceivable terror, every
death, every torment the mind can imagine. "O Mara, you cannot imprison me
again," Siddhartha says. "The rafters are broken, the ridgepole is sundered.
I have seen the builder of the house."

 To us who live daily with some measure of fear, this example may seem too
grand and too noble for practical emulation. But Siddhartha was a man, not a
god, and what he did can be accomplished by ordinary people.




 I have had much acquaintance with fear, and some with danger as well. There
is a difference. This difference may be too obvious to mention, but it is
frequently overlooked.

 Fear is a product of the mind. And danger can be met without fear. Surely
soldiers in battle know about this. There is no greater enemy than fear.




 


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